Taymor's Titus

Julie Taymor’s 1999 movie Titus is a dream of production design. Taymor’s alive, rich visual imagination and her academic propensity to describe ideas visually, attempting to make theory expressive, has great charm in its courage, its eager seriousness. Taymor is of the theater and has the love of artifice and surrealist illustration that fits well with the bloody dreamscape of Titus Andronicus, the least liked of Shakespeare’s work. It is an early work of Shakespeare, almost adolescent in its sensationalist violence. It’s an ugly and violent story, filled to the brimming with murder and mutilation, but has the incredible advantage of Shakesepeare’s gorgeous language, his depth of human understanding, always surprising you in leaps of stunning imagination and association — language coiled like a striking snake.

Taymor has arrogated the work to herself, making the look and feel a product of her own imagination. Taymor has adopted the dreary artifice of modernizing a historical work by setting some of the action in relatively recent history. She often uses the expression in her commentary, “I really didn’t care…”, referring to the audience’s understanding what she is presenting; this glib self-absorption pervades the movie. Her commentary on the DVD is fascinating however. She is sincerely involved with the symbolic and intellectually contradictory display she presents in the movie. I admire the chances she takes — the lengths to which she is willing to go. She knows the play well, having done it in the theater. This familiarity breeds both contempt for the storytelling function as well as great richness of presentation.

Taymor is so fond of the surface you begin to wonder if she has any depth of understanding or ability to communicate. You don’t “melt with ruth” at a Taymor production. She desires to impress and astound, a kind of visual “wall of sound”. She claims substance in every detail — where apparently every pimple means something to her — but she doesn’t grasp that “creative” ideas need to be communicated, need to be understood in a human and personal sense. She is detached, living aesthetically in the realm of decoration, of costume, of gorgeous sets and surprising imagery. There is, in sum, a lack of expressiveness that is not true to Shakespeare, and a credulous belief in theoretical symbology that doesn’t pan out — the artifice doesn’t help tell the audience the story, or give the audience the feeling to which she lays claim intellectually.

The King, The Kong

We just watched King Kong, the movie that lets us channel the monkey in ourselves. Okay, gorilla. It is quite a production: 3 hours, a cast of, hmm, dozens, and some very nifty special effects. I think the Hobbit-Movie-Guy was the director. You have to give it to Netflix. We reserved the movie a week before it was to be released on the 28th and it arrived on the 28th.

The movie could have been so much more. It felt as though the different divisions that produced the movie: the sound guy, the camera guy, the director, the actors, the animators — they must not have talked at all. The movie had a disconnected, muffled, unrealized feeling. The biggest problem was the undeveloped plot. They added nothing to the basic story. A beginning that was thirty minutes too long didn’t help; some imaginary exploration of the characters from an ironic viewpoint would have made the movie something contemporary, something smart. Likable, funny Jack Black was badly miscast. All the chances missed.

The most human character was the big chimp, who did an excellent job. The best sequence was a remarkable animation of run-from-the-monster involving a heap of Brontosauruses and that strange bird-like predator lizard that Spielberg made famous, all running for their bacon with the lowly bipeds who can’t leave things alone. Although there was another sequence of note, where monkey-defends-girl against those Tyrannosaurus nasties, which was just amazing in its technical accomplishment. The chimp is fighting the two lizards as they all fall down a ravine.

You root for movies like this because, as I say, it is about the monkey in us all, and you want to root for yourself.

DTP

I finally went ahead and updgraded from Panther to Tiger — 10.3.9 to 10.4.5. I put it off because of the time I knew it would take, and also wanting to wait until many important issues were pretty well worked out in the new system. It has taken a lot of time to prepare the old system for the upgrade, but now the new system is faster, more agile, just works better globally. Worth every minute of the effort — 3 or 4 days now. Spotlight, Autmator, Dashboard are worlds unto themselves.

The big one though is whether you can continue to use the programs you rely on. I had been using HogBay Notebook — a clever and elegantly simple program to work with text. It was like an extension of the Finder. But the developer changed directions and now, with the new system, I was faced with having to pick a new notebook type program. I went through the usual suspects, I tried out NoteTaker and Circus Ponies Notebook among many others, never got to StickyBrain — there is such a long list of these sorts of programs. Before he left the NYT to go back to the Nation James Fallows did a survey article about many such Mac programs. I am posting this to recommend a fantastic program I stumbled on, that does all and more than I expected. Matt Neuberg did a couple of reviews of the program for TidBits.

DEVONthink Pro is just an amazing program. I use it principally for text, but it can aggregate all sorts of information. It is very stable and fast — although they protest on the forums it is not a Finder replacement — but is sure comes close, as is true of many of the notebook type programs.

So the past few days have been a crash course on a complex program that is simple on the surface, but very powerful — something like Filemaker Pro for text. Anyway, if you do a lot of writing, if you work with many text snippets, it is worth checking out. It is a Mac only program and probably would best be run on Tiger.

One thing I do: I go to the forums of an application I am considering — you get a real feel for the sort of user and maintenance issues — and the level of involvement of the developer. The forums sparkle with useful advice and give you a sense of confidence. I’d also use the downloadable tutorial to learn — it seems better than the system help files included when you install the program.

[I have no connection to the company.]

New Gallery @ PM

I recently added a new Flash gallery — trying out a slightly different formatting.

New gallery. A broadband connection will work best.

Einstein Pissed

Einstein had a tantrum. When he was 5 — he hated his violin lessons. Then at 13 he heard Mozart. Einstein said that Mozart’s music “was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.”

Einstein’s son said of his father, “Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music. That would usually resolve all his difficulties.”

[The above derived from an article by Arthur I. Miller in the science section of the NYT.]

The Tipping Point

This discussion at Lehrer on Friday was gripping if you care at all about the outcome in Iraq. The tipping point in Iraq is here. Listening to assessments of the situation, at this moment, from reliable sources, has more claim on your attention than usual — this isn't partisan buffoonery.

The cascade of interviews — first an interview about the disaster of planning and implementation by the administration — a discussion between two experts who had studied the issue and written a book:

…And it was very evident to the forces in the field that this was a different type of foe. In fact, some of the intelligence officers said this is a kind of enemy that's not going to go away when Baghdad falls.

But these lessons really weren't learned at the highest levels.

And then the reliable David Brooks in impassioned tones decrying the incompetence of the administration:

…What you see is, first of all, how much they stifled debate. There were a series officers who knew better, knew what was going on. And, …one of them … they tried to fire. A lot now regret they didn't say something in meetings, because the atmosphere was so stifling of free debate.

And then the other thing you're — you are furious about is that, as — as the authors said, March 24 comes along. They are hitting resistance in Nasiriyah. They — it's time to adjust. They never adjusted. It is not only people in the military who knew they had to adjust. I went back and looked at the punditry from columnists.

Everyone was saying: This is a guerrilla war. It's no longer against the Republican Guard. We need more troops…

Removing Hussein was an honorable act. It is pretty clear in the world's approach to Iran now, that no one is willing to act but the United States when it really counts. To take such a decent effort, removing a dictator and giving a chance for a future to a long oppressed population, and blow off the clear messages from the military on the ground, out of denial and ego on the part of Rumsfeld and Franks, is unforgivable.

Don't Wibble Me

Wikipedia took a hammering recently for inaccuracy, but for me, it is just a great resource. You have to take any source of information with a grain of salt, but wikipedia ain't nothing.

I've always wondered where foobar came from — the programmer placeholder you run across in discussions of Filemaker Pro calculations and all sorts of CSS and HTML examples. The wikipedia article about foobar led to an even more interesting discussion about this type of placeholder text, which has the fancy-dancy designation “metasyntactic variable” :

A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers.

Here is a fascinating discussion of the placeholder “wibble” :

First recorded in the 1840s alongside wobble, wibble rose to prominence after it was used as a nonsense word in the Roger Irrelevant cartoon strip in UK adult comic Viz in the 1980s and later used in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth in 1989. The term is also used as a synonym for chatter and other contentless remarks, and (rarely) as a way of pronouncing “www”.

Wibble has also become something of an internet simming phenomena, with various websites dedicated to the so-called “cult of wibble”. The word gained immense popularity when Dr. Samuel Ramsden used it as his trademark sign-off on posts within the Section 47 Star Trek forums community from 2000 onwards. It was quickly adopted by other members of the site and spread to other Trek rpgs. Ramsden was later said to regret creating this particular application of the word, as it had gone out of control, and become more of an irritant than a humorous mark of respect for the net simming legend.

The Meeting

Today, Jessica Simpson, a woman who redefines “photogenic” — this beauty has never had a bad photograph taken of her — met with our lucky president, George Bush. Jessica said that our president “asked to meet me”. Who can blame George W?

Asked what she would discuss with Bush, Jessica said, “Who knows what I'll say?”

Cold March

March of the Penguins is one of those movies predigested for you by the memes of popular culture in one of its many word-of-mouth stomachs and then regurgitated out for you to provide cooing. How can the movie miss with a starring cast of thousands, each one fascinating, with a screen magnetism any starlet would envy?

The kiddie-approved aura of the movie can last as long as you want it to — it just depends if you want to really pay attention, or just watch the incredible creatures in their march of mating and food seeking, the dance of life in a cold clime. If you do pay attention though this is no kiddie movie. The rigors and heartlessness that is the realm of the natural world comes home hard. These amazing, quirkily beautiful figures out of a bestiary, have tough going keeping alive, let alone breeding. It's almost a joke what Mother Nature puts them through.

But the movie is worth the trouble because even with all the schmaltz these two French guys who made the movie ladle over the subject matter you just can't drain the power of the natural — you remember these creatures, you think about them. Penguins remind you of seals, of birds, of fish, of reptiles. Another example, like camels, of a creature put together by a committee, they move at a pace that is uncanny in its resonance with human rhythms — from a distance they look like a group of old men shuffling along. Almost everything they do reminds you of something. The rhythms of their lives are human feeling — they seem to experience their lives. They are resonant animals who might as well be living on another planet — so little contact do we have with them, so unfamiliar are we with their lives, so lucky are they for that.

New Gallery @ PM

I've updated and rebuilt the Selected Work gallery @PaintedMatter in flash format.

Check it out.

The Lobster Considered

Although I'm not privy to the arcana of current literary reputation I know David Foster Wallace has it. “It” being a good rep: he is usually said to be smart, very smart, or often, brilliant. When the world's least reliable, most predictable critic, Michiko Kakutani in the NYT, recommended Wallace's recent collection of essays culled from magazine pieces, Consider the Lobster, I was sure I wouldn't like it — she's infallible.

I am about two-thirds through the book and it is tough going. Wallace is not easy to read, except in tidbits, which do indeed turn out to be impressive. Wallace's penchant for playing with form and keeping himself at a safe distance is off-putting. Wallace overcomes the deficits because he is a shrewd, clever writer. As his appearance not long ago on Charlie Rose made apparent, he is self-consciously contemptuous of a crowd he wants very much to impress without showing he wants that approval. He had a disheveled, restrained manner on Rose — nothing of his brilliance was on display — which is partly the fault of the interviewer. Wallace's posturing had a juvenile aspect though, diminishing him.

Wallace is worth reading not just because his skillful prose is a reminder about how well language can be manipulated, or of how entertaining rhetorical devices can be when well implemented, but because, behind the showboating, Wallace makes a lot of sense. His densely worded review of Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is wonderfully informed. He understands the nuances percolating below the surface; he brings these insights to dry material, infusing it with human context. Wallace admires Garner's skill in proactively evading the inevitable attacks, generated by the culture wars, that abound in matters of language. Wallace well describes the players: The Descriptivists, 60's lefties who use political correctness as a sledge hammer to gain power (thought control police), using the familiar tactics of post-modernism: scientism and liberal guilt; and The Prescriptivists, dogmatists who from the outset give up their power in an obnoxious paleo-elitism that is both offensive as well as hypocritical in its own version of thought control — manifested as “decency” protestations.

Plausibility

[via Simon Singh]

We cannot pretend to offer proofs. Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. In physics we are generally content to sacrifice before the lesser shrine of Plausibility.
Sir Arthur Eddington

Pushed out

Camille Paglia is somewhat subdued in the decorous pages of the NYT. Her op-ed point seems to be that now is the time for Harvard to rethink its humanities education. Not exactly a revolutionary idea, but along the way she is up to her old standards of telling it like it is. Her comments about Larry Summers being driven out of Harvard by an entrenched politically correct academic clique hits the nail on the head:

…The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.

Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and others on campus.

The Aura of Modernism

Marjorie Perloff's podcast , The Aura of Modernism, was injected with energy and paternalism. She is a critic of contemporary poetry, a consumer of culture — loving culture the way a materialist would love and play with their “things”. She loves the high display of theory and argumentation. She sounds as though she is double-parked in this podcast — she rushes through things; but she has a lot to say — a lot of knowledge and opinion falling over one another — certainly worth a listen. She argues sensibly that “art matters”. She argues on behalf of modernism — the slogan name of art theorists for a group of artists (although the theorists would dispute — which is their main preoccupation — who belonged to their artificial categorizations.) Theorists lump into groups that most individual of activities, the creation of art, then aggrandize and dismiss the groups (“pigs at the pastry cart” is the way Updike described it) to further their careers; with only rare exceptions do they provide true appreciation, helping the public understand and gain insight.

Perloff's grandiose dismissal of Eliot's anti-Semitism, her uncritical, warm embrace of Duchamp's nascent anarchism, leaves you wondering if there is any substance to be found in her obsessive chattering. Cultural opinion can reduce itself to little more than a new dress to wear to the public debate. Aesthetics and morality are deeply intertwined — it is shallow to ignore that connection.

(Post-modernism attempted to connect the creation of art with the deep flaws [colonialism, imperialism, racism] in the societies that witnessed the creation of that art and called the judgment morally based— but that isn't a moral connection, rather, it is itself a shallow understanding of the dynamic of individual creativity, speaking to all human experience, and the society in which it exists.)

Perloff reads with enthusiastic condescension the commentary provided @Amazon by “amateurs”. She is amused by their naivete; she is dismissive but appreciative, as one would be with a child.

The Oscars

Hollywood still thinks it's Hollywood — a dream factory; yet somehow, contradictorily, Hollywood thinks it is deeply relevant; Hollywood thinks it leads the world into goodness; the social awareness of good, good people (movie stars) showing us, poor brutes that we are, The Way. That is the self-congratulatory fantasy Hollywood has — but now they don't even make good movies. More than ever, Hollywood is all about money and marketing.

As if to underline the launch of what would be a dreary enterprise, George Clooney, first winner, burbled something or other, then, in a bracing jolt of self-absorbed truth-telling said, “now I won't win for best director”; Clooney continued by telling us how “proud” he was of the socially aware Hollywood community. Since social awareness is what his current movies attempt to convey, he is saying he is proud of himself.

Actually, Hollywood does what it feels it can — it is a mass entertainment industry — and no more. It never led anything, but simply tries to be relevant as the social fabric flutters in the wind. Not an art form, movies are social documents, a collaborative entertainment form reflecting something of the times, of the received notions of the popular culture and its endlessly regurgitated fashions, which Hollywood confuses with ideas and convictions.

This iteration of the annual celebrity fest was particularly lifeless — it felt like a TV awards show. The written introductions to the categories were incomprehensible — they assumed you knew the plot-lines of the movies. Jon Stewart, an ironic, smart East Coast sensibility seemed out of place; he was all right, nevertheless.

One thing becomes more and more evident — there is a celebrity gene pool. Keira Knightly is Winona Ryder. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a young William Hurt. Matthew McConaughey is a young Paul Newman. There are more ringers in the movies than could be attributed to anything other than evolutionary perversity, or the lack of imagination of Hollywood casting and agent flacks.

Well, at least the Oscars gave me some ideas for rentals in our seriously depleted Netflix Queue. We've been watching Footballer's Wives — a sorry English soaper. One of these nominated movies must be better than that rental. Other than that, there were a lot of pretty women, which always brightens the spirit.

TV

So, while we are eating dinner we decide to turn on TV. There is Conviction, the show I had downloaded in iTunes, but it's there, so we watch it — well, some of it.

What's right:

Two actors are very good: the bumbling novice woman attorney and the conscientious black attorney both stood out, outdoing the material. The caring attorney is actually so good I didn't recognize him at first — he is the actor who played Angel's gang-member-good-guy cohort in, what else, Angel. Also in the show: the actor who was the boyfriend in Six Feet Under and is presented as the irresistible boy-candy character. He has an interesting, sculptural face. But he is an actor — he is supposed to be expressive. Too impassive, skeletal — he has a dancer's mask of a face — you just watch him.

And that was the good. The not so good:

Well, once again you have a show that looks like it came out of a factory. The writers seem to have no frame of reference other than other TV shows. The default dark gritty interiors seem to speak to the 1940's but are without referent; even old municipal court buildings have modern lighting these days— things are brightly lit in the halls of justice. The opening theme sounded like a rip-off of Alabama3 — the group whose music is often used for the Sopranos. The actors are almost uniformly dark haired and about the same age. Brainless casting — there should be clear demarcations in appearance; and who would have guessed it? — terrible writing. An example of the writing: the caring black attorney comes into a room with a battered woman who is being interviewed by someone in law enforcement. He says to the law enforcement rep, “Does she speak English?” Do you think a guy who was a caring attorney would speak around the victim — as though she is an object to be discussed? What are the producers of this show thinking?